October 22, 2014 - 00:00-October 24, 2014 - 00:00

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The Asian Dynamics Initiative (ADI) is pleased to announce the conference ‘Intra-­Asian Connections: Interactions, flows, landscapes’ to be held at the University of Copenhagen on 22-24 October 2014.

The conference will take place over three days and feature distinguished keynote speakers as well as panels emphasizing intra-Asian connections in order to highlight the historical contingency of modern borders and hence of area studies themselves.

Through comparative and cross‐border perspectives we seek out opportunities to rethink the ‘maps in our minds’; to theorize alternative temporalities, spatialities and modernities that emerge when Asia is not simply cast in opposition to the West; and to seek alternative epistemological grounding in conceptualizations of interactions, flows, and more dynamic landscapes.

‘Intra-­Asian Connections: Interactions, flows, landscapes’ is the sixth in a series of annual, interdisciplinary conferences initiated by ADI in 2008. ADI is a cross-faculty and interdisciplinary effort to meet the current challenges and demands for better knowledge of and deeper insights into Asian matters.

Call for papers

Much scholarship on and in Asia is compartmentalized in subcontinents (South, East, Southeast, Central Asia) and – within these larger regions – in individual country studies (e.g. China, Japan, India, Indonesia). This is understandable, given the investment it takes for non-Asians to learn languages and build effective research networks. But ‘Asia’ as we know it today is the result of myriad, multidirectional flows: economic, political, military, cultural, religious. In spite of ‘hard’, modern borders, such flows still define much of Asia. We only have to think about Chinese manufactured goods, Japanese investments, Korean soap operas, Nepalese Gurkhas, various diasporas with their feet in ‘host’ and ‘home’ countries, or transnational ethnic and religious movements to bring these to mind. Even today, Asian landscapes, ethnoscapes and ideoscapes are continuously remade, and centres and peripheries rearranged, through processes of capitalist expansion, globalization and regional integration, and the flow and circulation of people, ideas and objects. Obviously, this is not a one-directional process and attention should be given to the agency of actors in various localities to engage with transnational connections.

In this conference, we invite panels and participants to explore interactions and flows within Asia. We emphasize intra-Asian connections in order to highlight the historical contingency of modern borders and hence of area studies themselves. Mongols no longer rule East Asia, Hindu-Buddhist polities like the Cham principalities have vanished from the map, and new states like Timor-Leste appeared. Without abandoning the attention to detailed empirical (ethnographic and historical) research focusing on single regions, we encourage topical panels that situate localized phenomena in intra-Asian flows or that focus on cross-border interactions, spanning various disciplines and historical eras. Through comparative and cross-border perspectives we seek out opportunities to rethink the ‘maps in our minds’; to theorize alternative temporalities, spatialities and modernities that emerge when Asia is not simply cast in opposition to the West; and to seek alternative epistemological grounding in conceptualizations of interactions, flows, and more dynamic landscapes.

We invite abstracts that reflect the conference theme, but especially welcome perspectives relating to one of the following panel envisaged for the conference:

Travel along the Silk Roads

Maritime Territorial Disputes: China and its Neighbours

Governing Landscapes across Asia

Centering Southeast Asia from the outside in

Popular Cultures in and of and out of Asia

Intra-Asia connection in a Changing Arctic

Asian Concepts of Development

Civil Society in Asia reconsidered: Rights, Governmentality and Inclusion of the Disadvantaged

States of Lack and Dynamics of Emptiness and Fullness in China and Asia

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